We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2025 ACE Awards! All submissions were carefully evaluated by a panel composed of members of the CES Executive Committee. We
extend our heartfelt thanks to the reviewers for their time and thoughtful assessments.
ACE Early Career Research Awards
Global tales: Exploring cultural variances in parent-child interactions within narrative settings.
Parent–child storytelling is central to early language development, yet most research has been conducted within a single cultural context. This quantitative study will examine how storytelling practices vary across cultural contexts and influence children’s narrative recall by comparing three groups of parent-child dyads: Zimbabwean dyads in England, English dyads in England, and Zimbabwean dyads in Zimbabwe. Naturalistic home observations across free play, oral storytelling, and book reading will track caregivers’ verbal input, hand gestures, and eye‐tracking–measured visual attention. We address two key questions: (1) How have storytelling modalities and pedagogic goals co‐evolved within Zimbabwean and English traditions and hybridised in the Zimbabwean diaspora? (2) How do multimodal dyadic interactions transmit and transform narrative forms across cultures? By integrating behavioural, verbal, and attentional data, this study will offer a cross-cultural developmental perspective on how storytelling scaffolds early narrative competence and contributes to the cultural evolution of communicative practices.
Patricio Daniel Cruz y Celis Peniche
Can risk perception explain suboptimal use of social information?
Despite the theorized benefits of social learning, participants in controlled experiments consistently copy less than is optimal—instead over-relying on individual exploration. This may be explained by humans’ perception of risk behind social versus individual information. To test this hypothesis, I will recruit a well balanced sample of adults to participate in an online experiment (‘The Farming Game’), in which they can maximize payoffs by accurately choosing which of two crops to grow over variable-yet-learnable environments. To measure participants’ risk- profiles, this research design will mirror lottery-choice experiments widely used in behavioral economics. Participants will be asked to choose between a ‘risky lottery’ and a ‘sure gain’ option. How the information is presented will vary across conditions (whether they are asked to ‘copy socially’ or ‘explore individually’). However, the riskiness of the lottery choices will be constant for all, so any observed differences in risk-taking should speak to participants’ underlying priors regarding that source of information.
ACE Building Capacity Award
Promoting International Collaboration at the Intersection of Cultural Evolution and the Digital Humanities
The proposed project will involve a substantial visit by Prof. Joseph Dexter, co-founder and co-director of the Quantitative Criticism Lab, to the new Digital Humanities Lab in the Faculty of Letters and Humanities at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. The aim of the visit will be to enhance research capacity at the intersection of the digital humanities and cultural evolution through targeted knowledge transfer, collaborative project development, and sustainable academic network-building. During the visit, Prof. Dexter will engage with researchers working in historical linguistics, colonial studies, archaeology, and indigenous studies, which are core strengths of the host faculty and are deeply connected to the study of cultural transmission and transformation over time. The visit will focus on two interrelated themes: 1) the affordances of large literary corpora as an untapped resource for cultural evolutionary research; and 2) the need to diversify text-based research in cultural analytics beyond Modern English.
ACE Outreach Awards
Luke Glowacki, Zach Garfield, and Maud Mouginot
Foundations in Cultural Evolution: A Training Workshop for Ethiopian Scholars and Students
The Omo Valley Research Project, a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit, will organize a week-long course at the South Omo Research Center on cultural evolutionary anthropology for 10-14 participants from across Ethiopia. The course will provide a broad overview of key ideas in cultural evolution and relate them to the typical domains of anthropology most participants will have familiarity with, including family structure, religion, law, markets, food production, and socio-political organization. Lectures will include an introduction to the dominant theoretical frameworks and methodologies of cultural evolution, including experiments, fieldwork, and cross-cultural research. Lectures will be followed by discussion sessions to promote participant engagement with key constructs. Students will spend a portion of each day in small working groups guided by an instructor, where they will explore how to incorporate a cultural evolutionary framework into their own research. At the end of the week, students will share a brief project outline for group feedback. We hope that this forms both the starting point for cultural evolution research in Ethiopia, and also a network of scholars who have similar training and interests.
Andrew Jonathan Schauf
Enriching appreciation of Indonesian agricultural and maritime cultural heritage through agent-based modeling workshops
Many of Indonesia’s customary agricultural and maritime practices, long misunderstood from the perspective of Global-North-led techno-solutionism, are increasingly recognized as sophisticated evolutionary adaptations to complex socio-ecological challenges. In some cases, tools like agent-based models (ABMs) have helped science catch up with local wisdom. This project will develop Indonesian-language educational materials to introduce non-specialist audiences to ABM approaches while examining familiar agrarian and maritime issues through a cultural-evolutionary lens. Day-long workshops will be targeted at universities where students would otherwise be unlikely to encounter topics like these. Alongside ‘thick’ descriptions of real Indonesian socio-ecological systems, students will be introduced to essential ABM concepts and methods through interactive simulation exercises. Selected materials will also be integrated into a new undergraduate course, Multi-Agent Systems, at Bogor Agricultural University. There, STEM majors will be invited to reflect on the importance of trying to understand customary lifeways on their own terms, especially before proposing interventions.